the body symphonic

Dance & performance
Part of the Aerowaves Twenty25 program
Part of the Iridescent Festival

50 min.

18.11.2025

Tuesday

19:30

CNDB – Stere Popescu hall (Bd. Mărășești 80)

Tickets

the body symphonic (Festivalul Iridescent – CNDB)

18 noiembrie 2025 Ora: 19:30

CNDB - Sala Stere Popescu

Info

‘The body is a sacred place, because it bursts with life, and lasts briefly’ – Etel Adnan

the body symphonic (2024) is a solo performance – concert that observes the body as a site of resistance, an engaged this body which journeys through rituals of excavation – revealing new and unbound mythologies and allowing for a limitless agency of self-representation and rootedness.

Created in response to the multiple political and geopolitical crises in Lebanon – this work is a meditation on the body’s place in the struggle against occupation, where looking back , looking in and forward become strategies of steadfastness and liberation.

Manifesto

The body is a site of being.
It is matter that is shaped, deformed , that ascends and emerges.
It is a site of revolution, of oppression.
Of representation and mis-representation. Of wholeness and fragmentation.
It is the surface where ideas and action meet.
It is the container of manifestos, of traumas,
of unanswered questions and fragile answers.
The body has never crystallized.
It is always becoming.
Over and over again.

Choreography & Performance: Charlie Prince
Live Music: Charlie Prince and Joss Turnbull
With samples and recordings from the voice of Mouneer Saeed, from Mustafa
Said’s Into The Silent Zone في رحاب الضمت and of an excerpt from Sextant by Stellar Banger.
Dramaturgy: Erin Hill
Light Design: Joe Levasseur

Country: Lebanon

Biography

Charlie Khalil Prince (1991) is a Lebanese dance & performance artist. His interests are rooted in the intersection of the political and the poetic body, and the many profound resonances this may create. His trandisciplinary choreographic work and installations have been presented in several major festivals and theatres– including SPRING Festival (NL), Dansmakers Amsterdam (NL), Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (FR), Vancouver International Dance Festival (CA), Oktoberdans (NO), Fabricca Europa (IT) Tangente Danse (CA), Movement Research Festival (USA) and BIPOD (LB).
As a performer, Charlie has worked among others with Compagnie Alias (CH), Benoit LaChambre (CA), Andrea Peña & Artists (CA), La Biennale di Venezia (dir. Marie Chouinard), Cie Tumbleweed (BE) and Omar Rajeh – Maqamat (FR/LB)
In 2019 saw the birth of his first piece NOT ON THIS EARTH, a collaboration with Dutch-based choreographer Keren Rosenberg addressing conflict as a human condition, created and premiered at DANSMAKERS in Amsterdam, NL. The work was described by TheaterKrant as ‘hot, unstoppable and painful’ and went on to perform in Utrecht, Marseille and Montréal. In 2021, Charlie premiered Cosmic A* at SPRING Festival in Utrecht, NL. This explosive and virtuosic solo, accompanied by live musician Joss Turnbull, received critical acclaim and was presented on several major platforms in Germany, Italy and France throughout the year. He later re-worked the piece in 2024 with the new title the body symphonic and toured in NYC and Beirut.
In 2022 he premiered L’ogre, le Phoenix et l’ami fidéle, a 3 hour durational solo created in collaboration with choreographer and somatic practitioner Benoit Lachambre at the Vancouver International Dance Festival (CA). The piece addresses questions regarding healing, recognition, and resilience in Lebanese collective memory of the civil war and historical amnesia. That same year he was commissioned to create Migration Parade: Helical Song, a gallery installation in response to the felted sculptures of Alexandra Goodall and the sound installation of Danielle Savage. In 2024 he premiered concerto, a collaboration with writer and musician Olivia Tapiero. This work is a profound meditation on the cost of grace, and what it means to mourn the world as the world mourns itself. The work involved 6 performers, weaving within a mycelium of co-habitation and rhizome and ran at the Penticton Art Gallery in British Columbia, Canada.
Charlie holds a Bachelor of Music from McGill University in Montréal with a minor in Relgious Studies and continues to engage as a composer in his artistic practice.
In 2018 he received the prestigious Boghossian Foundation Prize for Dance and Performance awarded by Villa Empain in Brussels and Beirut. He was also an apap 2020 artist supported by European Union Commision for Culture from 2017-2020.